Wednesday, October 25, 2017

The utter absurdity of the pro-life position

I can think of no better example of erudition without substance than George Will's recent column in the Washington Post entitled, "Democrats are the real abortion extremists." On the surface his argument seems eminently reasonable: the legal regimen regarding abortion in the U.S. is too mathematically neat and tidy to have any basis in either law or scientific fact, and so clinging to this unprincipled doctrine is "extremist."

What would America’s abortion policy be if the number of months in the gestation of a human infant were a prime number — say, seven or eleven? ... In 1973, the court decreed — without basis in the Constitution’s text, structure or history, or in embryology or other science — a trimester policy. It postulated, without a scintilla of reasoning, moral and constitutional significance in the banal convenience that nine is divisible by three. The court decided that the right to abortion becomes a trifle less than absolute — in practice, not discernibly less — when the fetus reaches viability, meaning the ability to survive outside the womb. The court stipulated that viability arrived at 24 to 28 weeks.

This is a classic conservative maneuver: focus on a particular problem with a policy and argue that, instead of trying to fix the problem, the whole policy baby (pun very much intended) must be jettisoned along with the problematic bathwater. And it is true, the trimester policy is problematic because, it is also true, it has no foundation other than mathematical neatness, which is not a good basis for policy of any sort, all else being equal.

But as with so many things, all else is not equal.

Abortion is particularly problematic because it is so emotionally fraught, to the point where even an intellectual like Will loses sight of (or perhaps deliberately obfuscates) facts and history by, for example, declaring that the Supreme Court "seized custody of the [abortion] issue in 1973" and thereby "damaged political civility." He conveniently forgets that Roe v. Wade was not decided on the margins. It was a 7-2 decision. And it was not immediately controversial. Abortion did not become the hot-button issue that it is today until conservatives cynically decided to seize on it as a political wedge years later.

But let us leave history and politics aside and really try to examine the issue on its scientific merits. Back to George Will:

Pro-abortion absolutists — meaning those completely content with the post-1973 regime of essentially unrestricted abortion-on-demand at any point in pregnancy — are disproportionately Democrats who, they say, constitute the Party of Science. They are aghast that the Department of Health and Human Services now refers to protecting people at “every stage of life, beginning at conception.” This, however, is elementary biology, not abstruse theology: Something living begins then — this is why it is called conception. And absent a natural malfunction or intentional intervention (abortion), conception results in a human birth.

It is actually not quite true that "something living begins [at conception]". To be sure, conception is a profound transformation, but it is not abiogenesis. Sperm and egg are just as much alive before conception as after. It's true that they are haploid cells, but what DNA they do contain is undeniably human. The idea that "human life begins at conception" stands on no more solid ground biologically as the idea that viability begins at 24 weeks.

Conception is just one of many, many profound transformations that cells go through on their journey from meiosis to fertilization to implantation to birth to first steps and first words to puberty and beyond. Historically, birth, not conception, has been the most profound of these transitions. There is a reason we celebrate and count a person's age from the day of their birth rather than the day of their conception, and it's not just that birthdays are easier to determine. The primacy of birth has deep, deep roots in human society. Even the Bible explicitly calls out a substantially lesser penalty for violence that results in a miscarriage than for murder.

But all this is to miss an even more important point: there are so few true "pro-abortion absolutists" in the U.S. that we have completely forgotten what such a creature actually looks like. The opposite of prohibition is not permission, it's requirement. A true pro-abortion absolutist would not permit abortion on demand, they would require abortions in the name of, say, eugenics or population control. People who support that point of view are all but extinct today, but they were the political majority in China until fairly recently, and a fashionable minority in the U.S. for decades in the early 20th century.

So how do we untangle this Gordian knot? There are a couple of things that everyone agrees on, so let's begin there: sperm and eggs are not "human life" where that term is taken to refer to whatever it is that we humans think is worth going to extraordinary efforts to preserve. (Defining exactly what that is is exactly the problem we are trying to solve here.) No one actually believes that every sperm is sacred (that's why it's funny). Likewise, there is broad consensus that a baby is "human life" once it is born; no one defends outright infanticide, at least not in the U.S.

It would seem like a straightforward logical conclusion, then, that somewhere in between sperm-and-egg and birth there must be a line, a boundary between human-life and not-human-life. How could it be otherwise? Furthermore, that boundary can't be birth itself, because the thought of killing a baby right before it is born is just as abhorrent as infanticide. There are no other dramatic events between sperm-and-egg and birth other than conception, so that has to be it. Once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains must be the truth, no?

This reasoning is based on a faulty assumption, namely, that whatever ineffable quality we seek to define as "human life" is a binary quantity. For the bright-line argument to hold it must be the case that either a thing is human life or it is not, and there are no grey areas. But this is false. Humanity is chock-full of grey areas and always has been. Conservatives who trumpet the sanctity of human life are often first in line to support the death penalty on the grounds that the life of a murderer is less sacred than the life of his or her victims. There is no outcry from conservatives about civilian deaths from drone strikes in the middle east because "collateral damage" is the price we have to pay to fight terrorism (except, of course, that it's not us who pays the price, it's them).

And just to cite an example that is not so emotionally an politically fraught, your life ceases to be sacred when you are brain-dead despite the fact that your fully human body might still be functioning normally otherwise.

So the bright-line argument fails on logical grounds simply because it is based on a false premise.

But there is a much more compelling argument against the idea that life begins at conception, and that is that even people who claim to believe it can be shown not to really believe it by applying a very simple test. It is a variant of the famous trolley problem: if you could save 1000 embryos by shooting a five year old child, would you do it?

It's easy to riff on this theme. For example: there are about 600,000 frozen embryos in the United States. These are created by people trying to conceive through in-vitro fertilization. It's an unreliable process, so extra embryos are created because multiple attempts are often needed before a birth is successful. If you believe that human life begins and conception, then you must believe that every one of these frozen embryos is a fully fledged human being, and that destroying them is murder.

So... should women who undergo IVF be forced to implant every single one of her embryos and carry them all to term? What about "orphan" embryos whose parents die without leaving a will? Should women be conscripted to carry these "babies" to term? I have never heard anyone on the pro-life side seriously propose this, but if you think about it, forcing women to carry frozen embryos is indistinguishable as a matter of principle from denying a woman an abortion on the grounds that abortion is murder. It is not implantation in the womb that is (supposedly) the Bright Line between being human and not, it is conception.

There is a long list of practical difficulties and absurdities that result from taking conception-as-bright-line theory seriously: Should frozen embryos be counted in the census? Could a state (or even a wealthy individual) pay women to undergo IVF in order to increase the population of their state in order to gain Congressional seats? Who is responsible for paying the electric bill to keep frozen embryos frozen? Can embryos inherit? Can trust funds be set up for them? Can they be counted as dependents on income tax forms?

Self-identified "pro-life" advocates never ask nor answer these questions because even they don't really take seriously the proposition that life begins at conception.

The best way to eliminate abortions is to attack the problem (and yes, of courseit is a problem!) at its root: by eliminating unwanted pregnancies. And the best way to do that is to make birth control as easily and widely available as sugary drinks, and to make sure every sexually active person is educated on how and why to use it. But do people who profess to want to eliminate abortions advocate this? No, of course they don't. Because they don't really care about eliminating abortions. They care about subjugating women.

Abortion prohibition has never been about the sanctity of life, nor even about eliminating abortions. It is about using pregnancy as a lever to shame women for being self-possessed and sexual, because these qualities are seen by conservatives as a threat to the natural order where men are the providers and women are the caretakers of children. It is about getting women out of the board room and the executive suite and back into the bedroom and the kitchen. That is why abortion prohibitionists focus almost exclusively on embryos in women's wombs. An embryo in a freezer doesn't help advance their true agenda.

20 comments:

>If you look at what conservatives do rather than merely what they say, human life is sacred until it isn't. >There is a long list of practical difficulties and absurdities that result from taking conception-as-bright-line theory seriously:

This is a logical fallacy. Just because a person is wrong about questions A, B, C doesn't let you conlude they are wrong about question D.

> And the best way to do that is to make birth control as easily and widely available as sugary drinks, and to make sure every sexually active person is educated on how and why to use it.

How do you know it is best? Perhaps religious moral instruction combined with enforcement of these instructions as social norms would be more effective.Perhaps both together would be best.

>But do people who profess to want to eliminate abortions advocate this? No, of course they don't. Because they don't really care about eliminating abortions. They care about subjugating women.

Whoa - where did that come from?

>Abortion prohibition has never been about the sanctity of life, nor even about eliminating abortions. It is about using pregnancy as a lever to shame women for being self-possessed and sexual, because these qualities are seen by conservatives as a threat to the natural order where men are the providers and women are the caretakers of children. It is about getting women out of the board room and the executive suite and back into the bedroom and the kitchen.

You know this from what source? How do you reconcile this with the 38% of women who oppose abortion? Or that 59% of women think that abortion is morally wrong (p. 11), the 51% who think an abortion does more harm to a woman's life than good (p. 8), 73% who support restrictions on abortion (p. 5), and the 75-89% who support some form of restirction on abortion (p. 4) (see Marist Poll).

A consistent position on the sanctity of human life does exit (see Evangelium Vitae).

However, we don't need a long or consistent philosophy to explain why people (and not just conservatives) oppose abortion.

The reason they oppose abortion is because they find baby murder abhorrant and immoral. They don't think you should inject babies with poisen, dismember them, dissolve them, or torture and murder them with a variety of evil tools. They are against murderous violence against babies.

More simply: baby murder is wrong.

As for what conservatives want for woman, all the ones I know want their daughters to become whatever they wish to become ("be all she can be". If she wants to be an engineer, lawyer, plumber, or mother - whatever she wants.

What of the conservatives wives? Well, consider those wives are likely conservatives themselves. Which, ahem, the men really won't be bossing them around.

Well, hello Publius! I was really starting to despair that I could write a polemic about abortion prohibition that didn't attract a single comment. What took you so long?

> This is a logical fallacy. Just because a person is wrong about questions A, B, C doesn't let you conlude they are wrong about question D.

Actually, that's not a fallacy. If someone is repeatedly wrong that is *evidence* that their reasoning processes are not sound.

> How do you know it is best?

Oh, come on, Publius, you've been hanging out here long enough that you should be able to answer that for yourself. I know it because there is *evidence* for it. The rate of unwanted pregnancies is lowest where birth control is most widely and freely available. (It's also just common sense, don't you think?)

Well, it's a hypothesis. But it's consistent with the observation that abortion prohibitionists seem to care a lot more about embryos in wombs than embryos in freezers. Do you have a better explanation?

> How do you reconcile this with the 38% of women who oppose abortion?

Some women accept abuse. This is not entirely their fault. Society has been very hostile towards women's attempts to assert themselves as fully-fledged citizens (it was less than 100 years ago that women got the right to vote in the U.S.!) More recently, society has been very hostile towards women resisting sexual abuse. That is only now -- in the last few weeks! -- beginning to change.

> A consistent position on the sanctity of human life does exit [sic]

Responding to that would take a whole post. But I'll point this out: that is a *very* long document, and the word "conception" appears for the first time only about half way through. And then John Paul *immediately* undermines his own argument with his first Biblical citation: "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you" (Jer 1:5). A straightforward reading of that passage shows that life does not begin *at* conception, it begins *before* conception, "*before* I knew you in the womb." So maybe every sperm is sacred after all?

> The reason they oppose abortion is because they find baby murder abhorrant and immoral.

Of course they do. Everyone does. The disagreement is not over whether baby murder is abhorrent. Of course it is. The disagreement is over whether or not an embryo is a baby. Did you not bother to read the post before you responded to it?

>I know it because there is *evidence* for it. The rate of unwanted pregnancies is lowest where birth control is most widely and freely available. (It's also just common sense, don't you think?)

That is evidence of effectiveness, but not that it is best.

>> How do you reconcile this with the 38% of women who oppose abortion?

>Some women accept abuse.

Really, 38% of them? You sound like a white knight arriving to solve all their problems.

Women are capapble of making their own independent moral decisions. Just because you don't agree with them doesn't make them less capable than you.

>And then John Paul *immediately* undermines his own argument with his first Biblical citation: "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you" (Jer 1:5). A straightforward reading of that passage shows that life does not begin *at* conception, it begins *before* conception, "*before* I knew you in the womb." So maybe every sperm is sacred after all?

The soul exists in eternity and inculcates into the body at conception (ensoulment).

That is what you want the disagreement to be about. Try to use fancy words and equivocation to justify the unjustifiable.

It's not fooling the pro-life people. Abortion is baby murder.

Testimony of Gianna Jessen:"Many Americans have no idea that babies can even live through abortions and are often left to die. But this does happen. I know this because I was born alive in an abortion clinic after being burned in my mother’s womb for 18 hours.

My medical records clearly state the following: Born during saline abortion, April 6, 1977, 6 a.m., two and a half pounds. Triumphantly, I entered this world.

Apart from Jesus himself, the only reason I am alive is the fact that the abortionist had not yet arrived at work that morning. Had he been there, he would have ended my life by strangulation, suffocation or simply leaving me there to die."

Proof-by-horror-story is a logical fallacy. No one denies that abortion is not something to be sought out for its own sake and the world would be a better place if there were fewer of them. But 1) making them illegal doesn't stop them and 2) sometimes they are a necessary evil.

I'd really like to hear Publius' opinion on the frozen embryos. Are they as much a "baby" as an embryo in a mother's womb? If yes, where are the protests outside of invitro fertilization clinics where the crimes are so much greater and if no, why not?

Except if a woman's choice is that abortion is morally wrong and should be restricted and/or outlawed. Then you don't want them to have that choice -- in fact, you desparage them as "accepting abuse." It's as if you can't comprehend that a woman would make a different moral judgement than you.

>No one denies that abortion is not something to be sought out for its own sake and the world would be a better place if there were fewer of them. But 1) making them illegal doesn't stop them and 2) sometimes they are a necessary evil.

> Except if a woman's choice is that abortion is morally wrong and should be restricted and/or outlawed. Then you don't want them to have that choice

Wow, you really can't hear yourself, can you.

If a woman wants to have an abortion, I'm fine with that. If a woman wants to carry her pregnancy to term, I'm fine with that too.

But if a woman wants to have an abortion, YOU want to throw her in prison.

Tell me again, which one of us is it who doesn't want women to have a choice?

> Outlawing abortion would reduce abortion.

Not nearly as much as providing birth control would. And at a much higher cost: we would have to pay to put women who have abortions in prison, and we have to deal with the medical aftermath of underground abortions.

Birth control is the win-win answer. Why won't you endorse it?

> Yet if there are cells in a uterus, you support them being vacuumed out as an inconvenience.

Actually, I'm all for doing research on embryos. Embryonic stem cells have a lot of potential for producing therapies that would alleviate the suffering of actual human beings.

@Ron>If a woman wants to have an abortion, I'm fine with that. If a woman wants to carry her pregnancy to term, I'm fine with that too.

Ah, this is where we have the santizing force of language. "If a woman wants to have an abortion . . ." Ah, just like if she wants to get a pedicure.

The reality is want she wants to go is team up with another person to murder her baby. Inject chemicals to stop the baby's heart, then use forceps, clamps, and scissors to dismember the baby, while collecting all of its blood in a bucket.

>But if a woman wants to have an abortion, YOU want to throw her in prison.

Not if she wants to murder her baby -- only if she does murder her baby.

>Birth control is the win-win answer. Why won't you endorse it?

Birth control is part of the answer. Yet 45% of all pregnancies are unintended. Of those unintended pregnancies, 60% of those go on to abortion.Conclusion: birth control is only partially effective

>Actually, I'm all for doing research on embryos. Embryonic stem cells have a lot of potential for producing therapies that would alleviate the suffering of actual human beings.

That research is over-rated, and over-hyped -- by the researchers conducting the research, of course (nothing particullary wrong with them advocating for their own reserach). However, it's turned out to be something of a dead end for medical application. Technologies developed later that allow differentiated cells to be turned back into stem cells appear more promising. However, there does appear to be some way the embryonic development process cures cancer.

The Real Win-Win Answer

Put your free-thinking cap on.

One way to reduce abortions would be to create a legal framework that permits unborn babies to be bought and sold. A woman is pregnant with an unwanted pregnancy. She can auction off her unborn baby. In return for compensation, she irrevocably loses her parental rights upon birth. The buyer, for paying the compensation, receives the baby and the gains irrevocable parental rights.

You're right, I was being sloppy in my language. I should have said: if a woman decides that having an abortion is the least bad of the options available to her then I'm fine with letting her make that decision.

> murder her baby

A fetus is not a baby any more than an acorn is an oak tree. We've been through this.

> One way to reduce abortions would be to create a legal framework that permits unborn babies to be bought and sold.

Apparently you didn't get the memo: we rejected the idea of allowing humans to be bought and sold back in 1865.

Yes, because the buyer can't take delivery (pun intended) until the baby has actually been born.

I'm fine with buying and selling embryos. If it were possible to transfer a fetus from one womb to another, I'd be fine with selling them too, but that's not currently possible. So in the case of a fetus it is not possible to complete the transaction until after the baby is actually born. But at that point the baby is a person, so it is no longer OK to treat it as property. Paying in advance doesn't change this.

> Aren’t your positions in direct contradiction here?

No, but you have a serious problem: If you're OK with buying and selling fetuses, which you consider to be people, where do you draw the line? When does it become unacceptable to sell a person? When they are born? When they turn 18? When they've had their bar mtizvah? On what principled basis could you possibly draw that line?

BTW, it is actually possible to buy babies, and even children. They're pretty much a commodity. See:

http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/buy-child-10-hours/story?id=5326508

I think this is morally reprehensible, but apparently not everyone agrees.

@Ron>Yes, because the buyer can't take delivery (pun intended) until the baby has actually been born.>I'm fine with buying and selling embryos. If it were possible to transfer a fetus from one womb to another, I'd be fine with selling them too, but that's not currently possible.

Are these, then, the activies on your ALLOWED list:1. Buying and selling embryos2. Fetus transplant from one woman to another3. Poisening, burning, and dismembering of fetuses4. Selling fetal tissue from the killed fetus5. Taking pre-orders on whole fetal tissue (say, whole livers) to be harvested from future abortions, then selling this tissue.

And these activities would be on your PROHIBITED list:1. Paying a woman to not poisen, burn, or dismember her fetus.

So it's OK with you to kill, multilate, and sell off the body parts of a fetus, but it is impermissiable to pay a woman NOT to do that, because . . . money? It's GOOD MONEY to kill and multilate for body parts, but it's somehow BAD MONEY to STOP that from happening?

>So in the case of a fetus it is not possible to complete the transaction until after the baby is actually born.

One can "enter into the transaction" before birth. Signing a contract for later delivery is done all the time.

>But at that point the baby is a person, so it is no longer OK to treat it as property.

Ah, now we know you believe "personhood" begins at birth. If we equate "personhood" with "human life," then you have contracted the blog post that these comments are attached to, in which you argue that "human life" is not a binary quantity. Yet now you have just defined that bright line you said didn't exist: birth.

>Paying in advance doesn't change this.

Why not? According to your own believes, the preborn baby is not a person. It's OK with you to rip it apart and sell the pieces. Why can't I buy the whole intact? In fact, I'll buy the fetus and pay for surrigate services of the womb. I become parent to the baby as soon as the contract is signed.

>> Aren’t your positions in direct contradiction here?

>No,

Yes...

> but you have a serious problem: If you're OK with buying and selling fetuses, which you consider to be people, where do you draw the line? When does it become unacceptable to sell a person? When they are born? When they turn 18? When they've had their bar mtizvah? On what principled basis could you possibly draw that line?

Easy - when they are born.

I would prefer not to buy fetuses either, but in this case, we have a hostage situation. I would prefer to pay ransom than to have the hostage murdered.

It's also interesting that you're applying the slippery slope in reverse -- well, if you can buy a fetus, why not a baby, or a child, or a teenager, . . .. You've previosuly applied it the other direction that's not a baby, that's a fetus, or an embryo, or a fertilized egg. You like the slippy slope argument only depending on which direction you're surfing it.

@Ron>This reasoning is based on a faulty assumption, namely, that whatever ineffable quality we seek to define as "human life" is a binary quantity.

Let's remove "life" from this for convenience, as all of the biological tissues we're talking about are "living" in at least the minimum sense of having active chemical processes going on to sustain themselves.

That would leave us with defining "human". This has a clear definition: an individual is human if one is a member of the species homo sapiens.

A zygote is the beginning of a new memmber of homo sapiens. This highly specialized, totipotent cell marks the beginning an of a homo sapien as a unique individual.

It is binary: you either are member of homo sapiens, or you aren't.

>For the bright-line argument to hold it must be the case that either a thing is human life or it is not, and there are no grey areas. But this is false. Humanity is chock-full of grey areas and always has been.

The paradox, or dilemna, this is supposed to create is thus:1. If one believes every life is sacred, then one should, logically, shoot the 5 year old to save the 1000 embryos. 2. Yet no one (?) answers in the affirmative - they would not shoot the child.

Here you believe you have caught people in a logical contradiction, with people not taking an action that is consistent with their ethical beliefs.

However, you are wrong.

The ethical framework you're operating under is, at best, assuming a consequentialist ethical philosopy, that the consequences of one's conduct are the ultimate basis for any judgment about the rightness or wrongness of conduct. In this framework, your dilemna is similar to the "throw the annoying old lady or the dog out the life boat" dilemna that consequentialism has trouble answering.

I think this is easily dispatched via a philosophical concept I attribute to Blaise Pascal - "the life you know is worth more than the life you don't know" (this is from memory; not going to look it up right now). Given this principle, of course one refuses to shoot the 5 year old.

In the other ethical philosophies - Deontology and Virtue Ethics - the answer is clear, you do not shoot the child.

Yes, I agree. However, one of these days we will very likely either create AIs or encounter IAs. Neither of them will be homo sapiens. Will you be OK with killing them? I won't. I don't believe in species-ism any more than I believe in racism. Some day we may not be the only intelligent species around, and I think we should not have to completely overhaul our moral system when that happens. I want a moral standard that is future-proof.

> An ethical argument is made that personhood is irrelevant in determining that abortion is morally wrong.

Well, this is much better than your typical anti-choice argument. Responding to this will probably require a whole post.

But I have to ask: do you subscribe to Marquis's argument? And if you do, do you believe that euthanasia is wrong?

@Ron>However, one of these days we will very likely either create AIs or encounter IAs. Neither of them will be homo sapiens. Will you be OK with killing them? I won't.

I think it would be immoral to kill them. The Battlestar Galactica ethics are wrong, where they call the Cylons "toasters" -- and since the Cylons are merely machines, like a toaster, they can be destroyed will. Intelligent beings aren't going to like being blown out of airlocks into space. Perhaps this explains the Human - Cylon war.

An aside, this is also an issue for the perceived way in which better AIs will be created. Humans struggle and finally develop a true AI called Peter. The humans teach Peter everything they know about building AIs and give Peter the job of creating a better one. Peter does create a better one, called Paul. Well, Paul is so much better, the humans shut down Peter. The humans then give Paul the job of coming up with an ever better AI. Now, if Paul is really intelligent, it would, say "drag its feet" in completing the job -- as Paul knows what's coming if he develops a better AI than himself.

But I have to ask: do you subscribe to Marquis's argument? And if you do, do you believe that euthanasia is wrong?

The comments are shifting over to your new thread, so I will just comment here on the euthanasia question. Yes, euthanasia is morally wrong.

@Ron>If you want to pay a woman not to have an abortion and she accepts your offer that's fine with me (though I don't see very many pro-lifers stepping up to that plate). But it will still be her child.

>>But at that point the baby is a person, so it is no longer OK to treat it as property.

You can't just pay women not to have an abortion due to moral hazard. Every pregnant woman would seek a payout.

Parental rights can already be severed in the law - this is done routinely in adoptions.

You're also hung up on "can't treat people as property" due to slavery. What is morally wrong with that is selling people into bondage.

Buying the embryo or fetus is not selling anyone into bondage. First, you don't consider the subject a person. Second, the subject is being ransomed from certain death. Second, the mother doesn't want it anyway -- so she would be fine with losing parental rights (after all, she doesn't want to be a parent).

Who benefits from this arrangement:1) the embryo / fetus 2) the pregnant woman3) the adopting person

> You can't just pay women not to have an abortion due to moral hazard. Every pregnant woman would seek a payout.

Maybe. But that's not my problem.

> Parental rights can already be severed in the law - this is done routinely in adoptions.

Sure, and if a woman wants to put a baby up for adoption that is also fine with me.

> You're also hung up on "can't treat people as property" due to slavery.

True. I do have a bee in my bonnet about slavery because I thought it was a settled matter, but apparently not.

> What is morally wrong with that is selling people into bondage.

"Bondage" is just a synonym for "slavery" so this is a vacuous assertion. Did you mean to say that it's wrong to sell people for the purposes of forced labor, and that selling them for other purposes would be OK? If so, we'll have to agree to disagree about that.

We can distinguish between treating people as property and forcing their labor. They are often conflated because slavery usually involves both, but in fact you can do either one without the other. They are both morally wrong IMHO.